Sugarcane Traffic Cop

One of the wonderful things about living in a place like Kabul: you never quite know what you’ll see next.

My favorite chuckle for the day was seeing the traffic cop using a stick of sugar cane to direct traffic. In a place like Kabul you might expect something a little more forceful from the authorities. Sorry, tried to get a photo but it was dusk.

Even better was the story from our driver Farid, aka BBC Farid. He comes by this name by his non stop stories. Today’s was particularly good. So a couple of years ago a foreigner was driving along and asked to stop when he saw a traffic cop. He told the driver that when he travels around the globe he brings back a traffic sign*. He gave the driver ten bucks and asked him to go try to get the sign. The driver of course came back with the traffic cop’s signature, who was delighted for the ten bucks (he probably didn’t make that in a day).

*For those of you who haven’t traveled to places that have them, I’m referring to a little stop sign on a ping pong like paddle.

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Miel in North Kivu, DRC

Miel now lives with her partner Adam in Portland, Oregon and travels frequently within the pacific NW and abroad as she is able. She has worked in some of the roughest places on earth and traveled to sixty countries and counting. Miel is a traveling mama, and now travels with her toddler son, Clark.